calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/3/2008

Two exhibitions

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Louise Bourgeois

curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac - Jonas Storsve

This landmark exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois, organised in association with the Tate Modern, London, will occupy three different spaces in Centre Pompidou and include nearly 200 works (paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints) made between 1938 and 2007. The retrospective begins in the Forum itself with a giant spider in bronze and steel, never before seen in Europe. In Galerie 2 (900 m2), a chronologically-organised display offers an opportunity to discover the artist’s most important works while at the same time according a certain emphasis to the last decade in the career of an artist who continues to innovate even in her nineties. In Galerie d’art graphique will be “Tendres compulsions,” a more intimate exhibition conceived in the manner of a cabinet of curiosities. This will demonstrate the connection that exists between the artist’s work in different media, revealing the continuity of certain themes that have obsessed her throughout her career, while offering the chance to discover the most recent works on paper, a characteristic expression of her “late style.”

“My name is Louise Joséphine Bourgeois. I was born in Paris on 25 December 1911. All my work over the last 50 years and all its themes have their source in my childhood.” “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and drama.” The work of Louise Bourgeois, in many ways unique and unamenable to aesthetic categorization, moves between abstract geometries and organic realities, the artist exploiting every kind of form and material as required. Bourgeois thus shifted from the rigidity of wood in the Fifties to the liquidity of plaster and latex in the Sixties, before turning to marble and bronze in the Seventies and Eighties. In the Nineties she started using found objects to produce environments she calls Cells, evoking feelings, sensations, or childhood memories, and since mid-1990 she has been using fabric and clothing to make curious figurines, entwined couples, columns, and heads.

The motifs of sewing, of needle and thread, have been present throughout the career of this daughter of tapestry restorers, finding especially dramatic expression in the maternal, protective and reparative figure that is the Spider. A monumental version of the spider, entitled Maman, 1999, will be installed in the Jardin des Tuileries. The artists favoured themes are maternity, the couple, childhood, the body, sexuality and the ambivalence of gender, references to autobiography and private experience that have become essential touchstones for much contemporary art. For Louise Bourgeois, art and life are indissociable: “My sculpture is my body. My body is my sculpture.” Making art is a way of reliving emotion, giving it form, exorcising it. “You just have to abandon every day your past. Or accept it. And if you can’t accept it, then you have to do sculpture.”

Louise Bourgeois is one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century. For a long time known only to a few, her work went on to gain international recognition in 1982, when she was given a retrospective at MoMA, New York. Her earliest shows in France were at Maeght-Lelong in Paris in 1985, Galerie Lelong in Paris in 1989, and at the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon in 1990. These exhibitions were followed in 1995 by two exhibitions in the French capital, one at the Galerie d’art graphique at the Centre Pompidou (“Pensées-plumes, les dessins de Louise Bourgeois”), the other at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, while in 1998 the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux showed an exhibition of her recent work. Since the Nineties, Louise Bourgeois has been shown at the most important international exhibitions, among them the Venice Biennale (where she was awarded the Golden Lion in 1999) and the Kassel Documenta. Her last major retrospective was at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 1999, but there were also important shows at the Hermitage, St Petersburg, in 2001, and at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2002.

TENDRES COMPULSIONS
Drawings, prints and small sculptures (1938–2007) Accompanying the chronological display in Galerie 2, “Tendres compulsions” in the Galerie d’art graphique aims to bring out the strength of works more intimate and discreet in scale. Hybrid figurines in wood, latex or fabric, often pierced with needles, testify to the “fetishism” in the approach of an artist who sometimes turns to techniques of exorcism inspired by her affinities with Primitivism. A room devoted to the juxtaposition of drawings and sculptures looks at the themes of the “house-woman,” the “knife-woman,” the “stake-woman,” the spider, the couple, and maternity. The central space is devoted to a display of small-scale sculpture that takes up the same themes in plaster, marble, latex or bronze, while the second room holds a hitherto unseen group of works of paper that combine etching with hand-written texts on the theme of the body, Extrême-Tension (2007).

Among the other works shown here will be Ode à la Bièvre, 2002, a book of sewn fabric collages, and a portfolio of works primarily in red gouache on music paper, 10am Is When You Come To Me, 2007, the title an allusion to the daily arrival of the artist’s friend and assistant, Jerry Gorovoy. Louise Bourgeois continues to write poetical, autobiographical texts on any material that comes to hand, an example being the (musical) manuscript book in which she sketches her memories of Paris: Paris toujours Paris. The exhibition is an essential complement to the retrospective, giving access to the very crucible of the artist’s creativity, the unconscious mechanisms – the tender compulsions of the title – that preside over the genesis of these works charged with strong emotion.

The illustrated catalogue, edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Jonas Storsve, has been conceived as an alphabetical glossary of works and of key themes, concepts and influences, combining concise discussions and longer essays with hitherto unpublished writings by the artist herself. The Louise Bourgeois exhibition will afterwards travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Summer 2008), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Autumn 2008) and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (Spring 2009).

.........................

Pol Abraham

Exploiting the archives recently acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, the Centre Pompidou is to present the first monographic exhibition to be devoted to the French architect Pol Abraham (1891-1966). More than 200 original drawings, archive photographs and slide-shows will document the buildings of an architect who played a leading role in his profession for over half a century. The exhibition will also include a model sanatorium room with its furniture by Jean Prouvé. Produced between 1916 and 1966, Pol Abraham’s modern and idiosyncratic work won him a special place in the history of architecture, alongside such acknowledged masters as Le Corbusier, André Lurçat and Robert Mallet Stevens.

Pol Abraham trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was awarded his diploma in 1920, working first on the reconstruction of regions devastated by the First World War. Trained in the use of reinforced concrete, he saw his work as an ongoing reflection on principles of construction, close to that of the Perret brothers. Having written a thesis on Viollet-le-Duc and mediaeval methods of architectural construction, he appropriated the rationalist eclecticism of the 19th century, giving it a contemporary turn through the use of new materials and methods. He designed a number of private houses in Brittany, highly innovative in form, and was also responsible for key examples of Modern French architecture in Paris and its region. Among the latter are the Villa Thoyer-Rozat at Louveciennes – the subject of a publication by Bruno Taut in 1927 – and the Square de l’Alboni, Boulevard Raspail and Collège Montmorency buildings.

In the 1930s, he was responsible for four major sanatorium projects, entire neighbourhoods comprising spas, treatment centres, accommodation blocks and administrative buildings. In their reinforced concrete construction, bright colours and diversity of formal solutions these are veritable manifestos for Abraham’s own understanding of architecture. From 1942, he worked for the French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning on the reconstruction of the city of Orléans, where he experimented with different methods of modular prefabrication, with results as striking as those of Auguste Perret in Le Havre or André Lurçat at Maubeuge. As a specialist in modular construction, he was later appointed architectural adviser to the French Education Ministry and built many schools. In the 1950s, he was asked to design the infrastructure for the first wireless telecommunications network in France, designing the emblematic Meudon Tower and a number of relay towers and booster stations.

This exhibition thus offers the opportunity to discover, through unpublished archival records, the work of an idiosyncratic modern architect of the first rank.

Éditions du Centre Pompidou Direction of work : Frédéric Migayrou This catalogue is the first monography ever published on this artist. It contains a large anthology of texts published by Abraham himself and reproduces about one hundred of his projects.

Image: Louise Bourgeois

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou - Paris
Hours: 11 am - 9 pm every day ex. Tuesdays. closed 1 May
Admission: 12-10 euros, concessions 9-8 euros according to period
ticket valid one day for the Musée national d’art moderne and all exhibitions

stampa

permanent link